After a decade, unemployment rears its head

When unemployment in Britain rose above the million mark for the first time since the Great Depression there were angry demonstrations by opposition MPs and the Commons was suspended for 10 minutes.

That was in January 1972 when Ted Heath was prime minister. Over the next 25 years as unemployment rose and fell - touching the million level twice - every MP knew the constituency jobless statistics.

Few have them at their fingertips today after more than a decade of record employment, 3 million more jobs since 1997, as former Heath critic Gordon Brown again boasted this week, when the once emotive issue slipped down the political agenda.

Is this about to change? "Not yet ... it all depends," MPs reply, painfully aware about how much worse our economic prospects have quickly become. The chancellor, Alistair Darling, was right to tell the Guardian in August that the world faced the worst slowdown for 60 years. The Bank of England's cautious capo, Mervyn King, has only just embraced that verdict.

But assorted economists and the CBI challenge the pair's assertion that the recession - at last, they all use the R word - is likely to be sharp but short despite the extra 140,000 unemployed in the three months to October, who have brought total unemployment up to the 1.82 million mark, and the 980,000 benefit claimants, up 36,500. That 3 million figure looms again.

But many things are different now. For one thing most pain is expected in the south, which escaped relatively lightly in the manufacturing shakeouts of the 1930s and 1980s. It is London's bloated financial services industries that will get shaken now while more diversified Wales and the north-east - home to Jarrow, whose unemployed's march symbolised the 1930s - survive relatively well.

Phyllis Starkey, a Milton Keynes MP, notes that it is young people, part-timers and short-term contract workers who are getting laid off. That reflects the changing labour market and ministers' hopes that this "flexibility", absent in France or Germany, will see people reemployed quickly.

Making staff hard to sack makes them harder to hire too and vice versa. So goes the theory. Optimists predict those highly motivated foreign workers, those bilingual Polish graduates willing to work in pubs or drive taxis will go home. That should give Britain's unskilled a better chance to train and get work, perhaps on one of those Olympic projects where east London's unemployed locals didn't get their share.

Frank Field MP, scourge of lax migration rules, is already on the case.

In truth, no one knows what lies ahead as even the television news bulletins start to explain how nasty a bout of price deflation might be. In theory that would mean pension cuts. It won't happen: they learned what harm that did for employment in the 1930s.